


a merry wanderer of the night

by rain_sleet_snow



Category: Miss Fisher's Murder Mysteries, Old Kingdom - Garth Nix
Genre: Alternate Universe - Fusion, Ancelstierre (Old Kingdom), Charter Magic, Childhood Trauma, Developing Relationship, F/F, F/M, Grief/Mourning, Magic, Magical Inheritance, Necromancy, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, The Old Kingdom - Freeform, Unconventional Families, relationships are mostly background
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-02
Updated: 2020-02-02
Packaged: 2021-02-28 05:35:43
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,539
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22528708
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rain_sleet_snow/pseuds/rain_sleet_snow
Summary: Lady Phryne Fisher - cousin to the Abhorsen, hostess on behalf of Ambassadress Prudence Stanley, and toast of Corvere society - is a mystery, a marvel, and a pain in the neck.
Relationships: Elizabeth MacMillan/Daisy Murphy, Hugh Collins & Jack Robinson, Hugh Collins/Dorothy "Dot" Williams, Phryne Fisher & Elizabeth MacMillan, Phryne Fisher & Jane Ross, Phryne Fisher & Janey Fisher, Phryne Fisher & Prudence Stanley, Phryne Fisher/Jack Robinson
Comments: 25
Kudos: 95





	a merry wanderer of the night

**Author's Note:**

  * For [SecondStarOnTheLeft](https://archiveofourown.org/users/SecondStarOnTheLeft/gifts).



> For Niamh, who asked me for an Old Kingdom/Phryne Fisher crossover in my 12 fandoms of Christmas.

Lady Phryne Fisher was a pain in Major Robinson's neck. He'd heard her described as a Pearl of the North, which was a very poetic gloss to put on her pale, pale skin and shiny, shiny smile, but as far as he was concerned she was the grit in the oyster that precedes the pearl. He really didn’t know what he’d done to deserve her appearance in his life. He still wasn’t sure if it was a curse or a blessing.

It was not Jack’s fault that he had briefly been a policeman: there had been no other jobs going in his hometown, and his old dad had still been around then – the thought of leaving hadn’t felt right. Still less was it his fault that the army had funnelled him into the military police, where they felt he might be useful, after conscripting him during the Korrovia Emergency in ’09. Even less than any of the above was it his fault that he'd been at the Perimeter in ’13 to discuss a persistent smuggling problem with the Colonel when everything had gone suddenly and effectively to shit. Here and now, several years later, Jack had managed to extract himself from the Perimeter, catch his breath, and get back to dealing with drunken soldiers, stupid lieutenants with cars too fast for them, and reasonably minor fraud. Except that after the Perimeter someone had put the word out that Jack Robinson might live south but he knew the north, and all those tricky cases that nobody wanted to handle _magically_ ended up on his desk.

So, with startling regularity, did Lady Phryne. 

Jack leaned back to glare minatorily at her face instead of staying upright and glaring at her midsection, clothed as it was in a highly fashionable silken day-dress of ambassadorial purple. Jack did not make a practice of reading the fashion papers, but his clumsiest lieutenant was walking out with Lady Phryne's companion Dorothy, and Collins tended to repeat everything Dorothy said. Jack therefore knew Lady Phryne had been considered a Leader of Fashion from the day she set foot on Ancelstierran soil, with her hair in a bleeding-edge bob and a wardrobe of clothes made in exotic Old Kingdom fabrics using avant-garde Ancelstierran patterns. If the dazzling parade of outfits that passed under Jack's nose as Lady Phryne passed through his life, his crime scenes, and the newspapers was any guide, the wardrobe and jewellery collection had only expanded over the last several months.

Which begged the question _why_ , since Lady Phryne never did anything without some kind of a reason, up to and including selecting her companion. Dorothy had been a halfer girl from the north country whose citizenship nobody had ever troubled to doubt until she'd been falsely accused of murder; Lady Phryne had scooped her up and given her a job, a new wardrobe, and a complete set of Ancelstierran and Old Kingdom diplomatic papers. Jack had initially been bamboozled by this, but given what Collins said about Dorothy’s skills in piecing broken things back together and getting people to talk to her, it seemed likely that Lady Phryne had recruited a junior investigator to her firm.

So why the dresses, and the flash, and the society rambles? Just for fun? That was a reason of its own. Lady Phryne made little secret of the fact that she was here for a good time. So far as Jack could work out, Phryne's aunt Lady Prudence was the ambassador with the iron fist, and Lady Phryne was the decorative, charming velvet glove. There were plenty of similar diplomatic establishments, and Lady Phryne certainly made a fine hostess, but some nagging instinct told Jack that wasn’t the whole story. Lady Phryne was clever and adventurous, too much so to enjoy wasting all her time on frivolity, and besides – when Jack had been on the Wall in ’13, so had Lady Phryne.

Of more immediate concern was the fact that Lady Phryne, here and now, was sitting on top of his in-tray. Jack waited for her to say something scandalous, impertinent, or both, and was not disappointed.

“Did you miss me, Major?” She crossed one leg over the other and swung her topmost foot chirpily.

Jack folded his hands. “I never have time to miss you,” he said. “Hardly have I waved you out of my office than you've wandered back in. What is it this time?”

“A small matter of a murder,” Lady Phryne said cheerfully. “The factory girl, this morning.”

Jack blinked at her. “That was an accident. Collins wrote me a very competent report -“

“No it wasn't.” Phryne pressed her lips together and tilted her head. “I had a word with the victim, you see.”

Jack shot a glance at the door. Not quite closed, but closed enough that probably nobody had overheard, considering the conspiratorial way Lady Phryne had sunk her voice. He leaned forward. “You know that's not admissible in a court of law. And just because it's munitions doesn't mean it's my manor. She was a civilian.”

“Military secrets,” Lady Phryne said, turning her pale periwinkle eyes up to the ceiling coyly, “ _may_ be involved.”

“Do those float down the River as well?” Jack snapped.

“Sometimes,” Lady Phryne said very sweetly, and jumped off his desk, straightening her plum cloche and settling her sable wrap more securely around her shoulders. “Are you in, Major Robinson?”

The worst bit was that he was. When it came to dead bodies, Lady Phryne was invariably right.

When Jack had first met Lady Phryne Fisher, nobody had bothered to include either the Lady or the Fisher. _Lady_ might be a courtesy title, derived either from her high birth or her cheerfully high-handed manner; _Fisher_ came from her father, who had been the grandson of the head of the Fishers’ Guild in Belisaere. Jack had once picked up an encyclopaedia of the Old Kingdom while standing around in the most intimidating of the Ambassador’s Residence’s drawing rooms, and from that he had learned the Fishers’ Guild was exceptionally powerful. In Lady Phryne’s father’s boyhood, it had been even more so. It controlled organised fishery along both east and west coasts and the length of the great River Ratterlin - except where they ran headfirst into the Daughters of the Clayr and lost, Jack deduced – and once upon a time it had had a profitable interest in the Shipwrights’ Guild, too. But there the paragraph had broken off in a lot of asterisks Jack had not been able to pursue, because Lady Phryne had turned up to explain why she'd abducted an orphaned minor who was also a witness to a crime.

Baron Henry Fisher was therefore a very rich man, or at least belonged to a very rich family with a very rich background. He himself was a gentleman of leisure, and Lady Prudence couldn’t stand him. She couldn’t stand half of Ancelstierran society, in a polite gossipy way that didn’t dissuade her from eating lunch with them, but she rarely showed the scorn she did for her brother-in-law, and few of her other targets had Ancelstierran police and welfare records to back up her remarks. Lord Henry did. And the Old Kingdom didn't send many of its scions south, especially when they had met, wooed, and married a member of the Abhorsen family, but Lord Henry had thus been sent. He’d stayed for more than twenty years.

Jack had pulled the records at the Wall, because he could. Baron Henry Fisher and his wife Korei had crossed the Wall in ’08, months before the Korrovia Emergency broke out. Lady Phryne, who had given her occupation as nurse and her age as twenty-four, had crossed the Wall in ’11. Jack had first met her two years after that. Her ’13 crossing had not been officially recorded, probably because too many of the clerks were dead or dying at the time, but Jack remembered it well enough.

Given Jack's reasonably friendly relationship with the relevant civilian police forces, it wasn't hard to sketch the outlines of Lady Phryne's life before ’13. She had been poor, and she had been a source of concern and irritation to innumerable constables, welfare officers, and schoolteachers. She had disappeared from the records now and then, between thirteen and eighteen, and then between nineteen and twenty; and then she had been a military nurse, much the same way Jack had been a military policeman, and then she had disappeared again for a year, and then she had crossed the Wall. Whatever had happened there was well beyond Jack's ken. But it seemed reasonable to deduce that it had involved a great deal of money, and her distant Abhorsen cousins.

Who were not only the reason, Jack reflected as he stepped out of the car and handed Lady Phryne out of the other side, that Jack had met Lady Phryne at the Wall, but also the reason she knew such a lot about dead bodies. 

The woman doctor who met them at the factory gates, her eyes red-rimmed and her red curly hair drawn back into a severe bun, had a very different reason to know a great deal about dead bodies. Of all Lady Phryne's friends and relations, Jack thought he respected Dr Elizabeth Macmillan the most. She glowered at him when he appeared on her wards at the Corvere Women's Hospital, outdrank him at Lady Phryne's more select soirées (“I only invited the people I _like_ , Major Robinson,”), and occasionally threw things in his general direction if he asked overly pointed questions on her territory. If she said she believed there was a murder afoot even without the benefit of Lady Phryne's special skills, then Jack was prepared to hear her out.

He'd draw a decent veil over her connection with the young factory forewoman who had died - it was fortunate there were no _female_ indecency laws to make his path difficult there, as with Charlie Freeman - but he would still hear her out. Dr Macmillan was a scientist. She told the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, and damned a wretched policeman for anything dislikeable that he might do as a consequence. Jack could live with that.

She was also the only person Jack knew who had known Lady Phryne as a girl in one of the grubbier suburbs of Corvere, and was truly prepared to answer Jack's sideways questions about that time. Most of them she answered by saying merely “ask Phryne,” in her nasal southern accent, but whenever he asked her _so why did her ladyship come south again?_ there was a telling, hesitant pause before the inevitable two words. 

“Daisy's through here,” Dr Macmillan said gruffly. “Not that I've done an autopsy, you'll want a coroner to take charge of that, but I have just taken a look.”

“Mac,” Lady Phryne said, in that cut-glass Old Kingdom voice that could ring like crystal or cut like shards, even as she reached out to Dr Macmillan with one aubergine-gloved hand.

Dr Macmillan turned a hard shrugging shoulder. “Makes no difference, Phryne,” she said gruffly. “Doesn't change a thing.”

Jack felt his heart sink heavy in his chest, and his own shoulders follow it. He trod up to the sentry box - this was a military installation all right, the absence of concertina wire and presence of a civilian uniform on the sentry didn't disguise it well - and rapped on the glass.

“Major Robinson AMP,” he said, flashing his badge. “Don't pretend you don't know who I am, lad. Call up to AA Catterach and have Lieutenant Collins get down here as fast as he can, would you.”

He dawdled a second, to give Lady Phryne time to speak with Dr Macmillan, and then walked over, not too quick and not too slow.

“Dr Macmillan,” he said. “If you could show me the deceased.”

The forewoman Daisy was in bad shape. Dr Macmillan stared resolutely out of the high, tiny window, and Lady Phryne cast her a quick glance before bending to draw Jack's attention to certain features of the carnage that had been wrought on a woman not even twenty-five. She had been clever, Dr Macmillan said. Sharp. A coming woman in her department. She hadn't been able to afford university but had some advanced technical college classes in chemistry and a natural turn for people management to speed her advancement, though she used to say that the way the higher-ups talked, she might have been better off with biology...

Strange, Jack thought, and when Lady Phryne took an ostentatiously deep inhale he did too, and smelled - and smelled hot metal, and white fire.

It took two weeks to solve the case, and Jack had nightmares every night, showing up at work with heavy eyes and waxen skin. Miss Williams tutted, and said that though they were too far south for her mum’s old tricks she knew a posset that would be just the thing (and the damned thing was that Jack drank it and it helped). Lieutenant Collins looked worried and confused, but he'd never been near the Perimeter in his life so Jack fobbed him off, and little Jane Ross who knew what necromancers’ bells felt like on the ears looked at him with eyes that guessed too near the mark. Lady Phryne watched him, and asked Mr Butler to make coffee.

He dreamed of the Perimeter, of finding a regiment that treated peacetime like war and thinking it was all a little more than necessary. He dreamed of talking smugglers with the Colonel, sentry sent away so that there would be no leaks, and the shock of the sky boiling overhead, and the distant screams and the whistle-thump of shells that did not ignite and the Colonel leaping to his feet with a ball of fire in his hands. The wind had blown from the north for two weeks, and the Colonel had only survived one; the Abhorsen had come over the Wall within a day, bringing three or four other fighters dressed in the same blue and silver keys, but only one who knew Ancelstierre at all. One who smiled and joked with the men like she knew the rhythm of their smoke breaks, and (in the rare moments when she laid her sword down, pulled her helm off and rested) wore her night-black hair in a long plait, like an Ancelstierran girl too young for company. 

The Abhorsen had called her Cousin Phryne, and she had given no other name. The Abhorsen-in-Waiting and the other two cousins hardly seemed to give her the time of day, but Phryne, indefatigable, fought her way up and down the Wall for days at a time, as restless as a night nurse. And when she woke from her rest, if there was nothing to fight, she would pace the field hospitals with a better bandage there and some neater stitches here and a quick spell to her left and right. Half the men were in love with her, and if Jack hadn't had his Rosie he would have been too. But even then he'd known there was something uneasy about the way she could not be still, and that her Abhorsen cousins did not like her any better for not saving her strength.

And then (one week and five days in, the Abhorsen-in-Waiting and another cousin dead) Phryne had gone suddenly, rapidly south in a brief lull in the wind that allowed her to rev a motorcycle and ride like hell. Eighteen hours later - Jack had counted every one in the ashes of his dead redcaps, who knew too much to leave and too little to effectively defend themselves - the wind had dropped for good, and the Dead fallen in their tracks.

Jack had not been there to see Lady Phryne return to the Wall. He'd stood, swaying, and heard the Abhorsen say to the old 2IC that maybe there had been some merit in that Clayr seeing and a point to the Fisher girl after all. He must have made some protesting noise, for the Abhorsen glanced sharply sideways, and said: “Captain Robinson! A good fight for a man with no Charter mark.” And Jack had knelt in the mud and guts for his Charter mark with one hand on the comforting stone of the Wall, too wretched and numb to say that if no-one with a good word to say for Phryne Fisher could bestow it he wouldn't have it. Not for all the beer in Corvere.

Then he'd passed out and spent a week in hospital recovering, and a year at the Perimeter learning to use Charter magic without burning off his own tongue, and the end of it was that he never saw Phryne again. Not until she sashayed foot in Corvere, all sharp teeth and blithe eyes and swirling skirts. _Lady_ Phryne Fisher, further from the trenches and the mud than anyone could possibly imagine, meddling with his cases and his peace of mind.

She was not well-dressed in the dreams that plagued him now. In his dreams she wore her Perimeter armour, soaked in her own lifeblood. In his dreams, Jane was a toy thrown aside by shadows in the shapes of long-dead men, Dorothy was weeping and fighting for her life with flames like candles, Hugh going gallantly to his death with a drawn and gleamingly useless bayonet, Bert and Cec and Mr Butler shoulder to shoulder with redcaps they never knew and dying just the same...

Every night Jack woke up choking on the smell of white fire and the taste of metal, and every day he woke up with the case still unsolved.

It was a relief, when they found the man responsible for Daisy’s death. Even Jack who loved literature was not at all sorry that the books the killer was working from - the books Daisy had been caught copying phrases from, for Dr Macmillan to bring to Lady Phryne - burnt in the banefire. 

“Well, I suppose the university library will want to know what became of them,” he said, stirring the metallic ashes with a solid iron poker and opening all the windows. “Perhaps I should write a receipt.”

Lady Phryne's laugh was almost a cry, and Dr Macmillan had her broad surgeon's hands wrapped across her face, the better to muffle heavy, choking sobs. Jack stepped out and collared Cec, and had him drive the two of them home to the Ambassador's Residence. Once the remaining live culprits had been booked and the really tiresome investigation begun - Lady Prudence would want to speak to Jack first thing tomorrow because of the Free Magic connection, and it was anybody's guess as to whether Commissioner Sanderson of the Corvere Metropolitan Constabulary would beat her to an interruption of Jack's breakfast, and then of course somebody had paid these poor fools for their crimes, which was in itself actionable - Jack had Hugh drop him off around the corner, and walked up to the Residence.

The Royal Guard detachment, usually so sleepy so far from the Wall, were on edge. Jack attributed this to the faint whiff of metal that would have accompanied Lady Phryne and Dr Macmillan back to the Residence. Still, they knew Jack now, and when Bert came out and harangued them stiffly Jack was admitted not just to the Residence, but to Lady Phryne’s private parlour.

“Miss Williams is with Dr Macmillan,” Mr Butler said, in his characteristically confidential tones. “But Lady Phryne left orders to send you right up. Perhaps you would like tea.”

“That would be very kind, thank you,” said Jack, who thought he would like a double whisky, neat.

That was what Lady Phryne poured him when she let herself quietly into the parlour, a tasteful cream-coloured room with heavy sage-green curtains and a garden view; Jack couldn't help but notice that even the key to the writing desk was plated in gold, not silver. Lady Phryne had changed her clothes, from the deceptively simple peacock blue shift belted in silver and matching hat she had worn earlier to simple black slacks and a comfortable ruby red jumper with an ostentatious golden flower on one shoulder. Jack wondered if she considered herself off-duty, a question answered when Lady Phryne drained the tea he had poured and replaced it with whisky in both her teacup and his own.

“Will Dr Macmillan be all right?”

“She'll live, Jack. You know how it is.” Lady Phryne kicked off her shoes and curled up on the sofa next to the armchair he had taken.

Jack did know. “I'm sorry.”

Lady Phryne nodded. There was silence. 

“I once asked her why you came south again,” Jack said. “She told me I would have to ask you.”

Lady Phryne smiled and looked down. One hand cupped her cheek, and a raven-dark wing of her bob fell forward to hide her face a little.

“Unfinished business,” she said gently.

“You were born here, weren’t you?” Jack said, after a moment in which it seemed she would not elaborate. “Corvere?”

Lady Phryne nodded. “Both my sister and myself.”

Lady Phryne never mentioned a sister; Lady Prudence never said anything about another niece. But Lady Phryne’s police files had contained their own small mite on the subject of Janey Fisher, forever ten years old. Here was the missing step in every conversation with Lady Phryne, the variable left unaccounted for, the secret grief.

“They took you north for the Charter mark?” Jack said. “Or can you get it done here?”

“They took me to the Wall, no less,” Lady Phryne said, heavy with irony. “Unnecessary and expensive - Bain would have done just as well - but my father is a very theatrical man. He insisted.” She sipped at her whisky. “Yours was done there too, wasn't it?”

Jack swallowed his own cup of tea, and Lady Phryne poured a respectable dram into the teacup without even asking. He raised his cup to her in salute. 

“By the Abhorsen himself, no less,” he agreed.

“Ah, Cousin Daniel,” Lady Phryne said, and a faint expression passed over her face that did not bode well for Cousin Daniel. Jack could only agree. The Abhorsen had not recommended himself to one single digger on the Wall, his only virtues in Jack's eyes being that his powers over the Dead were indeed remarkable and that he gave the squaddies and Jack's redcaps a common superior to detest.

“I thought you were by way of being an Abhorsen yourself,” Jack said softly. “Remembering the Wall, back in ’13.”

Lady Phryne smiled absently, but shook her head. She stared out of the window into the slowly lowering evening for a moment, and then climbed off the sofa and lit the already made-up fire with a mother-of-pearl cigarette lighter that matched her revolver. She coaxed it into life over the course of a few minutes, then sat back on her heels and said:

“No. My grandmother on my mother’s side - nothing to do with Aunt P, thank goodness; she married in -“

Jack tried to imagine Prudence Stanley, Abhorsen, and came up blank.

“- well, anyway, my mother’s mother was a cousin to the main line. Daniel is my grandmother's youngest cousin, he's... he must be sixty, now. In theory the gifts can pop up anywhere in anyone with the blood. It's magical, not logical. But in practice, the title usually passes from father to son, mother to daughter... I have some of it myself, as you know. But I'm not an Abhorsen. I don't wield bells and I've never read the _Book of the Dead_ all the way through. All I know is what Daniel and Fionel, may her spirit rest beyond the stars, saw fit to teach me.”

Lady Phryne could be sarcastic but she was rarely bitter, and still more rarely did the smile fall quite from her face. It had fallen now.

“How did you find out?” Jack said, forbearing comment.

“About the blood? Oh, Father never shut up about it. But I always knew I had the Death sense.” Lady Phryne's eyes wandered again; she drew her knees up to her chest and pressed her cheek against the back of the sofa, fixing her gaze on the fire. “There is no Charter this far south, but the River still flows.”

She definitely wasn't talking about the Vere, which looped sluggishly through central Corvere, and sometimes had a current, on a good day. Jack swallowed. “Tram crashes? Sicknesses?”

“Yes,” Lady Phryne said, softly. “And then my sister. Janey. I'm sure you know all about my sister, a thorough man like you. I only ever found a hair ribbon. I never proved anything. It was after that that they sent me to Wyverley College, to learn Charter magic and stay away from Corvere. Uncle Edward and Aunt Prudence paid - Mother's family said it was no good keeping me so far south, you see. I needed to be taught. I would have turned to Free Magic to catch Janey's killer. I would -“

She broke off. The fire licked at the grate. A spark popped and vanished.

“I'm so sorry,” Jack murmured.

Lady Phryne closed her eyes. “I wish there'd been a policeman like you around, Jack. I'm sorry. Major Robinson.”

“Jack,” he corrected, topping up her teacup with the whisky.

“Then I'm Phryne,” she said, and smiled at him very wearily.

He smiled back. “Why didn't they take you over the Wall?”

“A Seeing,” Phryne said very matter-of-factly. “The Daughters of the Clayr said they would need someone who knew Ancelstierre. Daniel didn't believe them, but when Uncle Edward told him about me he thought he might as well go along with it.” 

Jack blinked, but did not argue.

“I would have run away and smuggled myself home by boat! They didn’t want anything to do with the daughter of a problem and I didn't want anything to do with them.” Phryne picked up her teacup again. “Do help yourself, Jack. So I came home to Corvere when I graduated, did a few odd jobs, lived the bohemian life -“ she winked - “and joined the Nursing Yeomanry in ’09 because my mother was sick and we needed the money. Charter knows, my father never could keep a job. But nursing...”

“I was on the beach at Korrovia too,” Jack said roughly. “You don't need to tell me.” Beautiful place, Korrovia - terracotta-pink sand beaches and black palm trees and the bluest skies Jack had ever seen. On the hospital ships anchored out in the bay and the tiny medical posts clinging to the basalt hills, death weighed on you so heavily it took your breath away. And Jack had no special connection to it, not like Phryne.

Phryne nodded, and swallowed hard. “I tried... various means of forgetting, but none of them worked.”

Jack knew all about those means of forgetting, too; a fair few mates of his had tried them. Jack himself had not, but he had never been able to put the pieces of himself back where they had come from, and his marriage to Rosie had not survived for long afterwards. Jack pushed away those glimpses of silent dinner tables and awkward mornings and Rosie pretending to sleep with her back turned to him, and focussed his eyes on the wavering flames.

“So I went north,” Phryne said, looking down into her cup and swirling the liquid still in it. “To Cousin Daniel, initially, and then to my parents. Cousin Daniel wasn't pleased to see me but since I got into the House in the first place, he could hardly deny I had the right...” A reminiscent smile curled over her face. “Dear Mogget.”

“What?”

“Nothing.”

Jack, seized by misgiving, was about to pursue this remark when there was an abbreviated tap on the door, which swung open. Jane Ross, dressed in the uniform of one of Corvere's most exclusive girls’ schools and dangling a boater by its ribbon tails from one hand, walked in. 

“Hello, Jane,” Phryne said, with rather a tired smile. “How was school?”

“It was fine,” Jane said, and then added with noticeably more enthusiasm: “Cec says you and Major Robinson caught another murderer.”

Jack stared down at his teacup.

“We did, Jane dear, and I'm afraid it was rather horrid.” Phryne pushed a hand through her hair, letting the thick fringe fall over back over her Charter mark - still and lightless, this far south. “Did you see Mr Butler on your way in?”

“Yes, and he said to ask you if Major Robinson would stay to supper. Lady Prudence is dining with the Hereditary Arbiter this evening but Dot's already said you're indisposed.” 

“Clever Dot,” Phryne said, smile hardly flickering. “As for Major Robinson, why don't you ask him?”

Jane turned her wide eyes on him. Jack had had every intention of declining the kind invitation, but nobody could resist Jane's pleading stare, or the delighted grin she got when she got her way, looking like nothing more than the plucky freckled protagonist of a girls' boarding school novel. Phryne had given Jane a Charter mark to protect her from the ill-effects of the necromancer’s bells, crude and weak as they had been, and Jack wondered suddenly if Phryne would send her north too. Not all the way to the Old Kingdom, Phryne clearly had little love for it, but perhaps to Wyverley, where she herself had studied.

“I’d be honoured,” he said. He’d miss the child, if Phryne sent her away.

“Run and tell Mr Butler, Jane,” Phryne said, unfolding from her seat. “Wait - did you see Dot, or did Mr Butler tell you what Dot had done?”

“I saw Dot,” Jane confirmed, “in the kitchen, making up a tray for Mac. Is Mac staying? Dot said she wasn't very well.”

“Mac is staying,” Phryne said, which Jack thought would be news to Dr Macmillan. Phryne poked up the fire and set the guard in front of it. “Jane, do you remember I told you a dear friend of Mac's had died, unexpectedly?”

Jane nodded. 

“It was her murderer we caught,” Phryne explained, leaning back against the wall and resting an arm decoratively along the mantelpiece. “Don't say anything to anyone; just keep it in mind. And go and tell Mr Butler we'll be four for supper, if Mac is too unwell to join us.”

Jane's brown eyes had gone perfectly round. She nodded and ran out of the room. Phryne's eyes followed her affectionately, and then, when Jane had nipped through a door and down a back stair where she could really race, heels hitting every step on the way down, Phryne let out a sigh and looked out of the window. She crossed to it, and took hold of the curtain, as if ready to draw it. Outside it was fully dark.

“Phryne,” Jack said quietly, conscious of the open door. “Why did you come south?”

Phryne paused, still holding the curtain. The silence balanced on the edge of a bayonet.

“Have you ever heard of a man called Murdoch Foyle?”

Jack had. His name had been in Janey Fisher's file. 

“You won't have heard everything,” Phryne said. “He wanted to be a necromancer. He kidnapped and killed little girls – his goddesses, he called them –“

Jack knew nothing about these so-called goddesses, but he remembered the missing children. A copy of Janey Fisher’s notes was stuffed into a large folder of unsolved disappearances, all girls between the ages of nine and fourteen, never satisfactorily linked to Foyle.

“- part of a specific process of sacrifice to attain certain powers. Had he been a better or more experienced sorcerer, it would very probably have worked. Something likely went wrong when he killed Janey - he made some mistake, or her Charter blood acted against him. If he had succeeded with Janey, the ritual would have been complete. We would have had a different kind of monster on our hands.”

“None of that was in his file,” Jack said. Foyle had been convicted of only one offence of kidnapping and unlawful imprisonment, and that was only because the girl had lived – drugged, but rescued by some unknown well-wisher, and able to testify. Her kidnapping postdated Janey Fisher’s by a week. If Phryne was correct, Foyle had been scrambling to fix whatever mistake he’d made.

“Public scepticism and fear,” Phryne said. “You know what they're like here, Jack, what they will believe and what they won't. It suited the then-ambassador and my Cousin Daniel to let the authorities believe there was nothing in his notes apart from the ramblings of a madman, and to let him hang. Except of course judge and jury could hardly be brought to believe such a polite, quiet, respectable man had killed four little girls, and he was imprisoned instead. So then Cousin Daniel thought he might die in jail.”

“And now he's up for parole,” Jack said. “That was in his file.”

Phryne fell silent. 

“He won't get out,” she said at last. “That's why I'm here, Jack. That’s why I came south. So he never gets out.”

She drew the curtains shut with a very distinct snap.


End file.
